Category Archives: portlet

For a project with Oracle Portal, I had to do some lookups in packages and procedures on the database to get some information about the project. Since I wasn’t working full-time for this project I had no access to the DB, except via the portal itself.

Several times I had the problem that the client wanted a quick answer for his question, but therefor I needed to dig into the code that was developed in the past. The problem was that the size for editing/viewing a package or procedure was limited to 30K and since there where several packages bigger than 30K, I couldn’t give them a quick answer.

If you only want to read the packages(not edit), there is a very easy portal solution for this problem:Continue reading →

As promised here is the continuation of the technical workshop we have followed.In this text I will talk about how we created a little appliciation in Webcenter with some build in features of webcenter. In most part of the exercise we used ADF to build this, but we have also build in some out-of-the-box portlets of webcenter such as the Omniportlet and the Rich Text Editor Portlet but this will be discussed later.

I will go into detail on the real webcenter development and I will not go into detail about the not really webcenter related issues(this is not a step by step guide)

If you want to know more about this, you will have to read furtherFirst thing we had to do of course is to open Jdevelopper, since this is the (free) tool which is used to create the webcenter portlets – portals. The version we need for using Webcenter is jdev 10.1.3.2.0 (or later).

Then we had to create a new application. If you want to create a porlet application you have to select Webcenter Application(Portlet, content Repository,JSF) as application template.This will not only create a new application for you, but it will already contain some structure to build your pages – portlets in. The structure contains 3 ‘directories’: Model, ViewController and Portlets. As we have already mentioned webcenter uses the MVC ADF framework. The next thing was creating a portlet. We had to right click the portlets ‘directorie’ in the application navigator and then choose the option below Web Tier -> Portlets which was ‘Standards based Java Portlets(JSR-168) the other option is the Oracle PDK-Java Portlet (this is based on the Oracle portal API’s).Next thing we had to do in the creation wizard was to select the web application version. We had the choice between j2ee 1.3 and J2ee 1.4

We also had to give in some names, titles, keywords,… and we had to make a choice which portlet modes we wanted to use(possibilities are: help, about, config, preview, print, view, edit and edit_defaults), for this exercise we only choose view, edit and edit_defaults. For each of these 3 modes a different jsp will be build.

In this wizard you will also have to create the parameters if you want to use some in your portlet.

Once finished, our first portlet was created. But before deploying this we had to create a link to an application server and a deployment file.

In this version of jdev there is a preconfigured OC4J for webcenter. So we used this container to deploy our application on, we didn’t had to install the webcenter suite for testing our portlets. You first have to start this container, this can be done by clicking the green light on the top right of the menu in Jdev.

Hint, when creating a connection you should use 22667 as RMI port, this is the default RMI port for the webcenter container.

Once your portlet is deployed into your OC4J you can find the WSDL URL by using http://localhost:6688//portlets/wsrp2?WSDL.We have now created a portlet but we don’t have a page to publish it on. Therefor we had to rightclick the Viewcontroller ‘directorie’ in the Application navigator and choose New. Once again you will have to choose a technology, in this case we had to choose JSF JSP(Web Tier -> JSP) . A wizard opens and we choose jspx (xml version of a jsp page). In the wizard we selected the needed libraries(adf faces components,adf faces html,customizable components, jsf core, jsf html) since we were going to use some parts of all these libraries we selected them all.

So now we have a portlet and a page, but how do we have to include this portlet into the page? Well we have to register the portlet into the oracle Webcenter framework. Go to the Application Navigator and right click the Viewcontroller and click new. Select WSRP Producer Registration(Web-Tier -> portlets). In the next wizard you will have to give in the WSDL URL(see above). Once you have selected all the other attributes you click finish and your portlets is registered.

Now you just have to drag and drop the portlet into the jspx file. Therefor you have to open your jspx file and then select your producer in the Component Palet and drag and drop your portlet into the application.Conclusion: I believe that there is a good future for this product it has lots of options and lots of potential, but you have to get used to all the possibilities of it and where you have to select what… But I believe that you really can create some nice working portal pages after a few days. If you want to learn more about ADF or webcenter there is only one option, start using it! I really got interested in it maybe you do too…

On the 17th of april we where invited to join a technical workshop about Oracle Webcenter for partners at Oracle DeMeern near to Utrecht (Holland).

We wanted to know what Webcenter really could do for us, and what the capabilities are, and of course what the next generation of Webcenter would look like.

Well, we came back full of enthusiasm and the will to explore and look deeper in the webcenter technology.

Read further …
What have we seen during that day?
First of all we got an introduction about all the different layers on which the webcenter framework was build.
And we also saw that webcenter uses several known standards like wsrp, jsr168, jsr170, web 2.0 …

They explained that the Webcenter framework uses Oracle Metadata Management (MDS). This is an XML based repository that stores all kinds of application metadata. In the version we use now this is file based, but in future versions the user will have the choice between file and database based storage.
Webcenter is the first tool in the fusion stack that uses MDS but in the next releases this will also be used for other tools.

In Webcenter it is also possible to use existing portlets/pages/… Therefore you will have to use the ‘Federated Portal Adapter’.
The other way round is also possible, by using the ‘JSF Portlet Bridge’. This will make it possible to publish any portlet created in webcenter to a portal (e.g. oracle portal) that supports jsr168.

The main subject of the day was the JSF part. Oracle uses their ADF framework for creating these kinds of applications.
Not being a real java expert, I really enjoyed working with this tool and the fastness of creating little applications with it.
In the webcenter there are already a few build in portlet applications like the rich text editor, omniportlet which we already knew from the oracle portal.

We also saw how the future of webcenter possible would look like.
First of all the UI of the portlets will look much flashier with more use of AJAX, dhtml,…
It will also be possible to change pages on the fly and there will be more drag and drop functionality.

Last but not least, we also discussed the positioning of the product, particularly against the oracle portal. This was a tricky one, but I kind of know now how I have to position it now. If you want to use open standards and you don’t mind to create applications (almost) from scratch (apart from the already build in applications like rte, omniportlet,…) this is a very fast and good development tool!

One of the next days we will handle the practical part of this day, to give you a glimpse on how webcenter works.

Ever wondered how to deploy your first portletized adf application to the ‘Webcenter preconfigured OC4J’ … it’s not documented in the Developer guide and you can’t find it on technet … so what should we do do …

Read further …

When you’ve created your ADF-application and you’ve portletized it to be deployed to your ‘Webcenter preconfigured OC4J’, you need to define the connection to your container (webcenter pre-configured)

This isn’t that easy as I expected because you can’t find the ports listed in the Enterprise Manager Console of the Webcenter pre-configured container. These settings aren’t documented either in the Developer Guide or on technet, so after a lot of searching and trying out we’ve finally figured it out.

There are 2 ways to get the connection-settings used by the ‘Webcenter pre-configured OC4J':

Check out the log-window when shutting down the container in Jdeveloper, the following information is shown: